West Virginians on D-Day

He lies in a Marion County cemetery,
hundreds of miles from Arlington.

Many of the men who worked with
him in the Marion coal mines didn't even
know he had fought in World War II. He
was once even left out of a veterans' appreciation
day at the mine.

"He never marched in parades or
wore his medals or anything," recalls
Marion County Commissioner Jim Sago,
who as a kid knew him.

But pick up virtually any history book
on the D-Day invasion of Normandy,
France - 55 years ago today - and
you'll find that
Harrison Summers of Rivesville
indeed fought. To say he simply fought, in fact,
in what may be the 20th century's most
pivotal military operation, rates as the
height of understatement.

Summers performed one of the all-
time remarkable war feats that day, single-handedly
killing 31 Germans. With
only a little help from two other squad
members, the paratrooper either killed
or forced to flee another 70 or so other
German soldiers, who were holed up in
a series of buildings near the Normandy
coast.

In his book "The Victors - Eisenhower
and his Boys: The Men of World
War II," historian Stephen Ambrose succinctly
sums up Summers' place - or
unfortunate lack thereof - in history.

Summers was nominated, but not
very vigorously, for the Medal of Honor
by battalion commander Lt. Col. Patrick
Cassidy, who later became a three-star
general. The paperwork got lost.

After his death from lung cancer in
1983, Summers' fellow members of the
101st Airborne Division attempted unsuccessfully
to posthumously award him
the country's highest military honor.

Military officials seemed uninterested
in dealing with such a long-ago case.

"Summers is a legend with American
paratroopers nonetheless, the Sergeant
York of World War II," Ambrose writes.
"His story has too much John Wayne/Hollywood
in it to be believed, except that more than 10 men
saw and reported his exploits."

There are any number of reasons for
Summers not receiving the medal. The
two men willing to help Summers in that
mad dash, Pvt. William Burt and Pvt.
John Camien, were unavailable by 1983
to corroborate the events.

Burt was killed in Normandy.
Camien survived the war but died before
Summers.

Michigan author and former
paratrooper George Koskimaki,
who has written three books on
World War II, points out that two
other soldiers from Summers'
502nd regiment received the
medal.

Perhaps the military brass
were reluctant to bestow the
same honor on a third member,
he says.

Summers' 51-year-old son
Richard, who works for the federal
Department of Health and
Human Services in Lorton, Va.,
wonders if his father's West Virginia
heritage had anything to do
with it.

"Yeah, it makes you think," he
.said. "When you're from a poor
state... "

The sheer weight of government
bureaucracy never helps,
Richard Summers said.

One thing's for sure: Harrison
Summers possessed no interest
in lobbying for the honor.

"He was just quiet," recalls
his son. "He didn't really want to
talk about it. That was in the
past."

'It was all kind of crazy'

Staff Sgt. Roy Nickrent, the operations
sergeant in Summers'
battalion, provides some indication
of the group's minds that
day.

Nickrent and Summers had
earlier walked through the town
of Ste.-Mere-Eglise, where American
paratroopers were hanging
in trees, shot dead before they hit
the ground.

"One of my best friends was
hanging in a tree," said Nickrent,
79, a retired police officer in
Saybrook, Ill. "He had been
burned up by a flame thrower.
Didn't even have a chance to get
his chute off."

Sgt. Summers didn't hesitate,
then, to storm the series of German
artillery barracks at nearby
St.-Martin-de-Varreville. These
were massively thick stone houses
which served as French residences
before the Nazi occupation.

He stormed the first barracks,
hoping his 15 men would follow
suit.

None did.

Still, he kicked in the door
and sprayed the place with his
tommy gun, killing four soldiers
and forcing others out the back
door.

Inspired, Burt joined him in
supplying cover fire, as a zigzagging
Summers - avoiding fire -
reached another house and killed
six more Germans.

A captain offered to help
Summers take the next house.
Just then a bullet tore through
him.

Another house, another six
enemies killed. Summers turned
the prisoners over to his men.

Why are you doing this?
Camien asked Summers.

"I can't tell you," he replied.

"What about the others?"
asked Camien.

"They don't seem to want to
fight," Summers said, "and I can't
make them So I've got to finish
it."

"OK," said Camien. "I'm with
you."

Summers and Camien moved
from building to building, taking
turns covering each other. Burt
chipped in with his machine gun
to kill more Germans.

With two buildings left, "Summers
charged the first and kicked
the door open," Ambrose writes,
"to see the most improbable
sight. Fifteen German artillerymen
were seated at mess tables
eating breakfast. Summers never
paused; he shot them down at
the tables."

Summers told Nickrent later
that some of the Germans, inexplicably,
kept right on eating
when he kicked in the door.

Burt and Nickrent set the
roof of the last building ablaze
with tracer bullets and bazooka
fire. Germans who sprinted out
in the open field were easy targets.

"The field was just littered
with the dead ones," Nickrent
said.

"It's a pity to see it, but that's
the way war was."

After five hours of combat,
Summers needed a rest. How did
he feel, someone asked.

"Not too good. It was all kind
of crazy. I'm sure I'll never do
anything like that again."

Nickrent liked and respected
Summers.

"He was a coal miner and he
didn't mind telling you that," he
said. "He was a hard-working
guy, an honest man. We were
pretty close."

"He just lost his mind, lost his
reasoning. He didn't care if he
got killed or not, he was going
to take some with him."

Proving the case

Accounts of these events also
appear in L.S.A. Marshall's
"Night Drop: The American Airborne
Invasion of Normandy,"
and "Rendezvous with Destiny: A
History of the 101st Airborne" by
Leonard Rapport and Arthur
Northwood.

Marshall worked as the
Army's chief historian. After interviewing
the paratroopers within
weeks of the Normandy invasion,
Marshall tore up Summers'
Distinguished Service
Cross and wrote the Medal of
Honor nomination.

Still, the honor never came.
Even Nickrent can't honestly say
he saw Summers enter each
house. His view was blocked by
the corners of the houses themselves,
he said.

An NBC crew flew Nickrent to
Normandy years ago for a piece
on Summers' inability to win
the medal.

He disappointed them by not
being able to verify Summers'
bravery.

Allen Barham of Monroe, La.,
who served as a platoon leader
in Summers' battalion, places
much of the blame on Cassidy.
He doesn't think Cassidy believed
the men who gave statements
that day.

"He wasn't one of my favorite
people," Barham says of Cassidy.
"As far as I'm concerned, I think
Summers is as well-qualified as
Alvin York."

'Good shoulders'

Summers did receive a battlefield
commission to lieutenant
and a Distinguished Service
Cross. He also earned a Purple
Heart for serious wounds suffered
in Holland.

He came back to Marion
County after the war and worked
as a coal miner and later a mine
inspector.

He earned a reputation as a
steadying influence around mine
disasters, according to a 1983
newspaper story.

Many people in Rivesville had
no idea of Summers' military
past.

"He was a gentle man," says
Sago, who talked to him some in
Rivesville.

"You'd never think speaking to
him or observing his behavior
that he was in such a violent situation."

Koskimaki got to know Summers
at 101st Airborne reunions.
Summers, in a rare moment of
reflection, retraced the moves he
made that day in 1944 for one
of Koskimaki's books.

Summers wasn't a particularly
large man, standing just under
6 feet tall. "But he had good
shoulders on him," Koskimaki
recalls.

Richard Summers knows a
thing or two about war himself.
He served a year as an infantryman
in Vietnam and worked as a Washington, D.C.,
policeman.

He has seen enough carnage
to avoid World War II movies
such as "Saving Private Ryan,"
which follows a squad from Normandy inland.

"I don't like all the blood-and-guts stuff,"
he said. "I'm more into things happy."

Richard Summers remembers
his dad fondly.

"He didn't take any stuff but,
you know, he was very good to
me. I wasn't always the best child...
We had our disagreements."

It's still not too late to honor
him, he says. President Clinton
has awarded other soldiers the
medal long after their service.

"It would be nice if they would
award him the Medal of Honor,
because he deserved it, plain
and simple."